Consistent use of graphic designs and other visual assets is imperative for all businesses. However, while most marketers know it’s paramount for brand recognition, only a few know how it can significantly affect trust-building with potential clients.
In this blog, we’ll explore how marketers and graphic artists can use consistency in graphic design to build trust and rapport with your customers. This way, you can ensure satisfactory conversion rates among your marketing campaigns.
Understanding consistency in graphic design
Consistency in graphic design pertains to the continuous use of colors, typography, images, layouts, and other visual elements across your marketing campaigns. Basically, its main objective is to maintain uniformity and coherence across your marketing channels.
Consistent use of visual elements across all assets ensures that all assets work seamlessly to convey a unified message and accurately represent your brand. This includes your logo, website, social media graphics, product packaging, and digital advertisements.
Without design consistency, all your products and offers would look compartmentalized from each other. This will create a hiccup within your marketing materials. It would be harder for your audience to relate your offers with one another, reducing your opportunity to create a steady flow of income.
However, what marketers and graphic artists don’t realize is that consistency isn’t synonymous with redundancy. The latter uses visual elements repeatedly, which mostly diminishes the effect of these graphic designs. The former, on the other hand, uses visual elements in strategic ways to elevate the content of marketing campaigns and create a lasting connection with customers.
Building trust through consistent design
Building trust is one of the most essential objectives of graphic design. Despite this, it’s often overlooked by artists. Here’s how consistent graphic design fosters trust among clients:
Creating a cohesive brand identity
Brand identity sets premium companies apart from mediocre ones. While all companies can generate revenue through various marketing campaigns, establishing a brand identity can help you create a loyal customer base. This doesn’t just entail a steady flow of income but a chance to scale your business with the confidence that consumers would still support your offers.
Want to learn more about brand identity? Read How Professional Graphic Design Enhances Brand Identity for Companies
Nike has always been consistent with their ads. It always has active imagery, minimalist quote, a logo, and a tagline. The consistent use of this graphic design gives the impression that you should use Nike if you want to be the best athlete.
Some of the most popular Nike ads.
Enhancing professionalism and credibility
The consistent use of visual elements adds a tone of professionalism and credibility. Launching random marketing campaigns without unity and harmony would make it seem like you’re not a legitimate website. Most importantly, it will reduce the impression that you have high-quality products or provide high-quality services to your customers. This can drive off potential clients.
While it’s undeniable that SalesForce offers an excellent business solution, their consistent digital ads helped them to establish their name within the B2B and SaaS industry.
Consistency within Sales Force’s ads.
Establishing a sense of reliability and dependability
Still, in line with your professionalism, every marketing material is a chance to prove to your clients that you’re a reliable and dependable company. Regardless of whether it’s just a simple Facebook post or a single email newsletter, every marketing asset can make or break your brand.
This is especially true for service or solutions providers that offer long-term partnerships with clients. High-ticket offers with retainer services should be accompanied by a high level of customer trust. As much as possible, you’d want to create an impression of “Hey, this is a good ad. I think I can work with them!” to all your potential clients.
For example, Slack has consistently promoted inclusivity and diversity within its ads. This sends the message that regardless of who you are, you and your team can boost your productivity through Slack.
Slack’s diversity.
Enhancing brand recognition and recall
Consistent use of graphic designs creates a recognizable and familiar visual language. This will help users and customers associate certain things in their lives with the company. For instance, even without the logo, customers can identify that this is a McDonald’sMcDonald’s ad because the company has always been consistent with its use of red and yellow colors.
McDonald’s minimalist ad. Source: Template
Leveraging consistency for effective marketing campaigns
Consistency can help companies create and launch effective marketing campaigns. The higher the brand recall, the easier your audience can resonate with your advertisements. This will be a lot more cost-effective for the company, as it will ensure that the budget for each marketing campaign can translate into conversion.
This is a sample costing for running Facebook ads. Surely, no business wants to put its budget to waste just because they fall short of using its visual assets correctly.
Sample Facebook ads manager. Source: AdEspresso
Tips for maintaining consistency in graphic design
Maintaining consistency across your marketing assets is a lot more challenging than how you think it is. Oftentimes, marketers and artists face the dilemma of whether they should prioritize being consistent with their brand or optimizing for a specific marketing channel.
Here are some of the best practices to help you achieve consistency throughout your graphics designs:
Developing brand guidelines and style guides
One of the most effective ways to establish consistency across your visual marketing assets is to create brand guidelines and style guides. Brand guidelines contain the overall value proposition of your brand and how it presents itself in public in all channels, whether it’s for marketing or not. On the other hand, the style guides contain the technical specifications of your marketing assets. This includes your color palette, typography, visual hierarchy, layout, graphics, and more.
Creating style guides won’t just help you achieve consistency on your graphics, but it will even make the graphic designing process more efficient and effective. The next time you have a new offer, your graphic artists can easily visualize how your marketing campaign should look like.
This is an example of a well-crafted style guide. It contains all the necessary information a graphic designer might need when creating visual assets.
Sample of a website style guide. Source: Natsumi Nishizumi
Utilizing consistent color schemes and typography
While there are numerous visual elements you have to consider, prioritize being consistent with your color schemes and typography. Brand experts suggest these two visual elements stick the most with the audience.
When creating a color palette for your brand, make sure that you can use it across all your marketing channels, be it digital or not. For the typography, make sure you prepare typesets that can accommodate all kinds of content, be it one-liner header or long-form content.
To learn more about selecting a color palette for your brand, read Choosing the Right Color Palette for Branding and Marketing Materials
Sprout Social is one of the leading social media marketing solution providers in the world today. Regardless of how innovative their products and services are, they fall short in establishing their brand through their inconsistent social media graphics. This gives their competitor, HubSpot, a chance to reach out to more qualified leads.
Sprout Social’s inconsistent graphic designs.
Ensuring design consistency across all touchpoints
Marketing touchpoints pertain to business channels where your company gets to interact with your clients. This includes your website, social media accounts, mailing list, and even sales presentations.
The consistent use of graphic designs should be implemented in all your marketing touchpoints, regardless if it’s for a public or private audience. This means that the graphic designs on your sales pitches are as important as those on your social media accounts.
Want to learn more about designing sales pitches? Read Designing Compelling Presentations for Sales and Client Pitches
Hire Professional Graphic Designers to Ensure Visual Consistency
Maintaining visual consistency to build trust and recognition with clients is challenging, but not with professional graphic designers. Luckily, Seter Graphic Labs can easily assemble your own team in no time.
Seter Graphic Labs graphic designers deeply understand design principles and brand identity, enabling them to create visually consistent graphics that align with the brand’s aesthetics and values. Whether it’s the logo, website, packaging, or social media posts, our team can ensure that the design elements, color palette, typography, and overall style remain consistent.
Most importantly, Seter Graphic Labs ensures that the consistency of graphic designs will translate into customer trust, which enhances recognition, and reinforces the brand’s reputation. Through this, your brand can achieve unprecedented customer loyalty and revenue generation.
Interested in learning more about Seter Graphic Labs? Read our service list here.
In Summary
Now that the internet is brimming with numerous eCommerce and B2B brands, consumers have become extra careful when creating a purchase. For this reason, it’s imperative for businesses to utilize all potential means to establish trust and recognition among their client base; this includes the consistent use of graphic designs. The simple act of using your logo, color palette, and typeface throughout your marketing campaigns can significantly affect your company’s revenue generation.
